It was the onset of winter in 1531, the dark time of the year. The Spanish conquest of Mexico was not going well. Though the initial removal of Aztec nobility from power had been accomplished with relative ease, winning the hearts and minds of the people was proving difficult. Coercive measures from the Spanish governor were being met with growing resistance and the missionary efforts of the Catholic Church were largely unsuccessful.
And then a miracle occurred.
Juan Diego, an Aztec peasant who had converted to Christianity, was stopped one morning by the sound of birds singing and a woman’s voice, calling to him in his native language. It was the Virgin Mary, in the apparition now known as Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The course of New World history was changed. Human sacrifice stopped virtually overnight and thousands of Aztecs converted at once to Christianity. Eventually, five million conversions would be attributed to this apparition and a shrine was built on the site, which had previously been the domain of the Aztec earth goddess, Tonantzin.
Three and half centuries later, on a ranch near the Arizona/Mexican border, Cayetana, a fourteen-year-old Indian girl, awaits the arrival of her first child. Cayetana, one of many “mounted and forgotten” by the white master, expects little for herself or her child. Nicknamed The Hummingbird, for reasons she doesn’t understand, she is old enough to have learned that life offers little other than trouble.
Hummingbirds, though, are holy birds, they carry prayers to God, and when her baby falls into the hands of Huila, the ranch’s medicine woman and midwife, there is a sign – a red triangle on the forehead. “Red triangles, Huila knew, were reserved for the powerful ones” — thus was Teresa, the future “Saint of Cabora” born.
Luis Alberto Urrea had heard stories about his great-aunt Teresa since he was a boy. As an adult he learned that the Saint of Cabora was much more than a family folk-tale and began researching her life in earnest. Twenty years later, he published the fruits of his labor in a novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
There was more than research involved; Urrea says he also had to learn how to tell such a story with “honesty, honor and care.” Though Teresita was indeed a real person with a well-documented life and work, Urrea eventually decided that “fiction would be truer on a deep soul level than nonfiction. Only fiction could put the readers into the dream.”
Teresita’s mother deserted early on, leaving her in the hands of an abusive aunt. Huila becomes her protector and teacher, training her in the healing arts of the curanderas and their sacred approach to life. Huila is a Christian, her baptismal name is María Sonora, but her Indian roots run deep. Doves and lambs, deer and hummingbirds, Dios, Lios, it was all the same to Huila – prayer was prayer.
As Teresita grows, so does her beauty, her powers, and her unmistakable resemblance to the patrón Don Tomás. Eventually he acknowledges their relationship and brings her to live in his house. She learns to bathe regularly, wear shoes and to read but she remains one of The People. Continuing her training, she decides her life work is to ease suffering.
At age sixteen, Teresita is brutally raped and beaten. She languishes in a comatose state for some days and then is pronounced dead. On the last day of her wake, she sits up in her coffin – she has been sent back, she has work to do. Word spreads and the people begin to come. She heals, miracles occur, she begins to preach. The throngs swell into thousands, the government and the Church take note, and Teresita and all those close to her must struggle with the reality of her gift, the “catastrophe of holiness.”
The ongoing interaction of Indian and Christian belief that began in Mexico in 1531 is one of the themes of this story. Teresita is an Indian medicine woman, a curandera, and a Christian. When the Church denounces her, she just works harder.
Urrea sought the deep soul level of truth for Teresa and he finds it. Told with exuberance and joy,
The Hummingbird’s Daughter is a big book, a book for winter nights when we long for the comforts of story and the darkness gives us permission to snuggle down and savor the telling. And as any curandera will tell you, story is the light that guides us home.
(Photograph from Snap Shock, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)
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